


and miles to go before i sleep

by galaxyowl



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (or whatever you’d call the mind fuckery happening to vanya), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben Hargreeves-centric, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Fix-It, Gen, Hallucinations, s2 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25962895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxyowl/pseuds/galaxyowl
Summary: “No,” Vanya says.“What?”“No,” she says again, sharper than she knew she was capable of in that moment. “Ben, I… I haven’t seen you in over a decade. I’m not losing you again.”
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 13
Kudos: 290
Collections: The umbrella academy





	1. the woods are lovely, dark and deep

Ben looks at her, and gives her that soft smile, and Vanya makes a decision.

“No,” she says.

“What?”

“No,” she says again, sharper than she knew she was capable of in that moment. “Ben, I… I haven’t seen you in over a decade. I’m not losing you again.”

He takes her hands. “It’s okay,” he says, “really.” She looks at him, and doubt flickers across his face. “I don’t even actually know _how_ I’d get back out, anyways.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she says. She gets to her feet, freeing her hands, and her eyes flare white, just for an instant.

“No, hey, no, don’t—“

She takes a steadying breath. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” A giggle bursts out without her meaning it to. “I mean, it’s not like this place is even real, right? It’s all…” She gestures vaguely. “So who knows what would even happen if I, uh. Went off.”

“I think I’d still rather not find out,” Ben says.

Fair enough.

Vanya looks around the room, like maybe there’s an answer hidden somewhere in plain sight. Then she looks back at Ben, who’s just watching her with an unreadable expression.

“We’ll get out of here,” she says. “Just trust me.”

“I’m supposed to be saving _you_ , you know,” he says. “Awfully rude of you to turn it around on me.”

Vanya thinks about the feeling of horror in her gut when her siblings had first brought Ben’s mangled body home. She hadn’t been able to save him then. None of them had.

“Maybe this time around,” she says, “we both save each other.”

“Maybe,” he says softly.

Vanya scans the room again. There is a staircase back the way she’d come (or had she? doesn’t matter, don’t think too hard about it, Vanya, your subconscious is mixing metaphors). Could it be that simple? She looks to Ben, and he seems to have followed her gaze.

She offers him a hand, and he takes it, and they climb the stairs together.

They emerge back up into the Academy dining room, and something shifts.

Their father takes one look at Ben and says, “Number Six,” or maybe “Number Seven,” it’s hard to tell. “You’re late.”

“Sorry,” Ben mumbles.

He realizes, distantly, that he’s covered in blood. Spattered red all down his crisp uniform.

But of course he is—because he’s not in the Academy at all, he’s bleeding out in the street, as Luther shouts something that he can’t quite make sense of, because most of what he’s aware of right now is the pain, even as his siblings shout, even as they bundle him into a vehicle and lay him out in the medical station at the Academy, even as Allison—he’s pretty sure it’s Allison—grabs his hand and says, “I heard a rumor—I heard a rumor that you—“ but she can’t get through the rest of the sentence because she’s sobbing too much.

Ben realizes, distantly, that he’s dying.

He’s aware of their father entering the room, of Diego shouting at him—of Vanya, gentle Vanya, peeking in the door and seeing him splayed out there.

“Is he going to be okay?” Vanya says, tears audible in her voice.

“Obviously not,” Luther—or maybe it’s Diego, or maybe it’s Allison—says. “What are you even doing here, Vanya?” and Vanya flinches back, and runs to her room, and lets the tears come for real.

And then she is crying in Leonard’s cabin, and the blood is not Ben’s but Allison’s, or maybe it’s both.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she babbles, and she doesn’t know whether she’s apologizing to Ben or to Allison or to Sissy or to the world of people she killed when she brought down the moon, and Leonard puts a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she knows she doesn’t trust him but she thinks she loves him anyways, but only ever _thinks_ it, never loves him. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t love her back, not really, but it’s so much closer than she ever thought she’d get.

But he is safe and she is kissing him, now, fiercely, except that she’s kissing Sissy, and it is soft and right and perfect, the sunlight streaming in through the windows and making her blonde hair glow. Except that the sunlight is pouring down straight from overhead in the garden and she is kissing Jill, except that she’s Ben, except that he’s Klaus, and that wasn’t how he wanted to do this, not really, but it’s so much closer than he ever thought he’d get.

Jill smiles at him and says, “Come with me,” and she’s leading him by the hand through the gardens, except they’re really the courtyard of the Umbrella Academy, except the Academy is crumbling and in flames, and when Ben looks up at the night sky there’s no moon, only the dusty memory of one. “Huh,” Jill says, “I guess the prophet was right.”

Ben stumbles away from her at that, because every reminder of how fully she’s bought in to Klaus’ bullshit is a reminder of all the ways Ben has failed, and she looks at him, and blinks, and then walks straight through him.

“Wait!” Ben shouts, but she’s gone.

“Ben?” Vanya steps out of the shadow of one of the crumbling walls. “Where are you?”

“I’m still right here,” he says, and he steps towards her, puts a hand on her arm—except that of course, he doesn’t. Ghosts can’t touch people.

“Do you know what’s happening?” Vanya says, gaze flicking across the courtyard, searching for something she can’t find.

Does he know what’s happening? He’s in her head. Or she’s in his. It doesn’t make a difference at this point.

The night around them goes silent, and Vanya takes another step, but she stops short when her hand makes contact with a pane of glass. She's in the room in the basement, her siblings standing beyond the window, arguing about what to do with her. She can’t hear anything that they’re saying, can only stand at the window and mouth, _Please help_ , but help is never going to come. Not unless she makes it herself. So she tears down the Academy and it’s the most beautiful song she’s ever heard, and then she’s splayed out on the pavement (bleeding out on the pavement—but no, no, that’s not her) and a woman with a kind smile and a Southern accent is saying, “Oh my word, I didn’t even see you there! Are you all right, ma’am?” and when she looks at her Vanya thinks that yeah, she is going to be all right.

But there’s something she needs to tell her. Something important, something she’s realized. Vanya grabs Sissy’s arm and says, “You were wrong about me, you were always wrong about me. I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster, Vanya,” Sissy says gently.

“I _am_ ,” she says, and the tentacles emerge from her stomach and hurl Sissy against the back of the bank vault, leaving lipstick-red smears along the floor.

Ben tries to reign them back in but truth be told he was never all that good at it, he was always one wrong step away from this. Away from his sibling’s bloodied bodies in front of him, away from Klaus— _Klaus_ —taking one look at him and running, because the ghosts have never been anything but horrifying and Ben is a ghost now. Maybe he always has been.

“What would you do,” he asks Vanya when they are thirteen years old, sitting in Ben’s room, “if one of us got hurt on a mission?” He doesn’t say _died_ , but it’s what he means, even then. He’s seen plenty of death in his time.

“Do you think that’ll happen?” she says, real worry in her voice.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugs.

“It won’t,” she says, sharper than she knew she was capable of in that moment.

“How do you know that?”

“Because—because—“ She stands and paces. “Because I won’t let it, okay?”

Ben laughs. “That a promise?”

Vanya stops, and looks at him, and nods solemnly. “Yeah,” she says, “it is.” She meets his gaze, and she knows even then it’s not a promise she can keep, but she means it anyways.

She means it with every fiber of her being, every second of every day, until the day that she is standing in front of Ben’s coffin in the snow with tears on her face.

Dad talks. Her siblings talk, and then yell at her, and she leaves, except that Klaus is still there, outside, hands gleaming blue. Ben’s first memory of his second life is the sight of a snowflake drifting through the air, and Klaus, looking at him with those big, scared eyes.

Vanya gasps awake in the interrogation chair, her irises dimming to a warm brown.


	2. but i have promises to keep

Ben more or less _falls_ out of Vanya’s body and onto on the floor, and for a moment he just lies there, reorienting himself. Refamiliarizing himself with the relative solidity of reality, with his own non-solidity.

Distantly, he’s aware of the objects flying around the room settling to the ground, of Vanya getting to her feet and calling his name.

Vanya. God, _Vanya_. Ben can’t think of anything much more coherent than that after the experience he just had. (He did it. He saved her. He stopped the apocalypse. Pretty good for a guy who’s seventeen years dead.)

By the time he’s managed to stand, Vanya is halfway down the hallway, still shouting “Ben?”

He follows her, slowly, as at the end of the hall Diego and Klaus get unsteadily to their feet. Vanya helps Allison up, and the look that passes between them as Allison takes her hand holds something Ben can’t read.

“Ben’s dead, Vanya,” Allisons says gently. “Do you remember…?”

“No, I know,” Vanya says. “But he was there. In the…” She trails off.

Ben looks at Klaus, and for the first time in a long time he sees the scared teenager of all those years ago.

“How did you do that, anyway?” Diego is saying to Vanya. “You figured out how to control it?”

Vanya looks back towards the empty interrogation room. She doesn’t know Ben’s right next to her. “No,” she says, “I—like I was saying, Ben helped me.”

Klaus raises an eyebrow at Ben, and he’s once again the Klaus Ben has been trailing for the last decade and a half. He doesn’t know where to even start explaining, so he just nods.

“What?” Allison says. “Klaus said that Ben didn’t make it to the ‘60s.”

“He lied,” Diego says. Allison turns to him, wide-eyed. “I talked to him—to Ben—myself earlier. I, uh, meant to mention that at some point, but there’s been a lot going on.”

“You talked to him?” Allison says, her voice as fragile as glass, and she sounds the way Ben felt when she showed up on Klaus’ doorstep, days ago now, and he’d caught a glimpse of his sister for the first time in years.

Diego nods.

“Klaus, is he here?” Vanya cuts in. “Is he okay?” Her voice wobbles.

Klaus glances from Vanya to Ben.

“Klaus, I swear to God, if you don’t tell her the truth now I am going to figure out how to murder you myself.” It comes out more affectionate than venomous.

“No need to be so dramatic,” Klaus says with a sigh. And then, to Vanya, “He’s here, yes, and being quite rude about it.”

Vanya smiles, tears hovering at the edges of her eyes.

***

They all meet back up at Elliot’s place, eventually, and scatter themselves across the room. Before the news reports, before the fear, before it’s become clear quite how bad their new situation really is.

Ben perches himself on the staircase banister; Klaus takes a nearby spot on a couch. After seventeen years Ben’s made something of an art form of finding spots to sit where people are unlikely to pass through him. (“You’re like a cat,” Klaus joked once, and he’d bit back a comment about how he clearly hadn’t had nine lives.)

“We do have one piece of good news,” Diego says as he enters. “Ben is here.”

Luther says, “Wait, what?” at the same moment that Five says, “Did you guys not know that?”

“You knew?” Allison says, collapsing onto the couch. “What, was I the only person in this family who hasn’t been having secret conversations with our dead brother?”

“Well—I haven’t had a _conversation_ with him,” Five says, from where he’s leaning against a wall.

“Klaus said ghosts can’t time travel.” Luther sounds genuinely confused.

Five looks at him. “No offense,” he says, “but I am not for a second going to defer to _Klaus’_ expertise on the subject of _time travel_.”

“Hey, some offense taken,” Klaus says.

“Shut up,” Ben says.

Five rolls his eyes. As much as Ben is sure he’d hate to hear it, he’s really got the whole _surly teen_ look down. “Anyways,” he adds, “I saw him when—“ He breaks off. Lowers his gaze. After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “In the doomsday timeline. Ben’s ghost was there. With all of you.”

Ben keeps forgetting that when Five talks about the apocalypse, it’s not something abstract. He watched the rest of their siblings die.

No one says anything. What do you say to that?

Allison is the one who breaks the silence, eventually. “Can we talk to him?” she says, looking towards Klaus. “If you… How did you do it earlier, with Diego?”

“Oh, no, we’re not taking that particular tactic again, I don’t think,” Klaus says.

Ben should maybe be annoyed at that. But then, after everything that had happened with Vanya, the ease with which he’d almost lost himself—maybe shelving the whole possession thing for a while is a good idea.

Diego snorts. “Really? I thought you were a good look on Ben.”

Allison opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. “You know what? We don’t have time to unpack that right now.”

“I suppose we could always try the old-fashioned way, though,” Klaus says, seemingly ignoring both of them.

Ben doesn’t have to ask what he means. Klaus had gotten… not amazing, but pretty okay, at making Ben corporeal-ish with his powers. They’d practiced, after they’d gotten to the ‘60s, back in the early days when Klaus had more time to himself and Ben had more patience for him.

He raises an eyebrow. “There’s no _way_ you’re sober enough for that.”

“I’ll have you know I haven’t had anything to drink in at least, what, six hours?” Klaus says. “Believe me, it has been a long day.” He waves a hand. “Point is, I’m not… _un_ sober.”

“Wow, ‘unsober,’” Ben deadpans, "they should really come up with a word for that.”

Klaus glares. “Do you want me to do this or not?”

Ben wonders what’s changed, that after days of badgering Klaus he’s finally willing to not just acknowledge him, but try this. But he isn’t about to ruin it by questioning it. “I want you to do it,” he says softly.

Klaus takes a breath, and closes his eyes. Ben watches him, a strange nervousness taking hold of him. Their siblings watch too. He can’t begin to guess what _they’re_ feeling.

Blue light flickers across up Klaus’ wrists. Ben raises his head sharply, looking from Allison to Five to Vanya, their gaze’s still trained on Klaus.

“Um,” Ben says. He laughs uncertainly. “Testing, one, two, three? It occurs to me that we’ve never—“

He’s cut off as Vanya jumps from her seat and envelops him in a hug.

And then he’s hugging her. Holy shit, he’s hugging her, like actually him, and not him in Klaus’ body, not some weird brain projection of him—him. He is hugging her and they are both real and Ben has fantasized about this moment so many times that it’s impossible it’s actually happening, but it is. He’s here.

He could spend all day just basking in the contact, but after a moment Vanya steps away with a soft smile and says, “Thank you. Again.”

“Thank you,” he says. Neither of them have to say what for.

Ben looks past her, at the others, their faces ranging from Allison’s open-mouthed gape to Five’s carefully-neutral expression to Diego’s genuine smile.

“Uh,” he says. “Hi, everyone. I guess it’s kind of been a while, huh?”

***

At the farmhouse, after it all, there is a brief moment of respite—while Vanya talks with her sweetheart, while Five tries to commandeer them a briefcase. Ben sits in the barn and watches the last remnants of the snowstorm kicked up Vanya-but-somehow-Harlan’s powers flurry to the ground.

“Hey,” Klaus says from the doorway. There’s a moment’s hesitation before he says, “So, I realize you’re probably not going to answer this, but what even happened back there in the FBI building?”

Ben meets his eyes. He doesn’t know how to even begin to describe the experience of being a ghost attempting to share a body with a drugged-up telekinetic who happens to also share at least half of your traumas.

“It’s complicated."

“Complicated how?”

“Just… complicated,” he says.

“Mmm-hmm. Well, good talk, Benny.” Klaus turns.

“Wait,” Ben says.

Klaus turns around and looks at him, and Ben is reminded of nothing more than that first day, at his own funeral, when Klaus had turned and seen him there.

Ben hadn’t really known what he was going to say when he asked Klaus to wait, to not go. But the thing that comes out of his mouth is, “I was scared.”

Klaus furrows his brow. “Of… Vanya? Cause I’ll be honest, dude, that whole situation wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, all the—“ He mimes a spinning motion with his finger, the whirlwind Vanya’s powers had blown through the place.

Ben sighs. “When you first called me back,” he says. “I didn’t just come back because you made me. I was grateful. I was scared of....” He laughs. “Well, of dying, I guess.”

Klaus’ jaw snaps shut. Emotions war for position on his face. “Oh,” he says.

“I’m not scared anymore,” Ben says, because if he’s doing the whole emotional vulnerability thing it seems important to mention that part.

“Oh,” Klaus says again, clearly going for a casual tone and not really succeeding. “So I guess this is goodbye, huh?”

Oh, shit. “Uh, no,” Ben says quickly, “that’s not what I meant, sorry, wow.” This conversation suddenly seems untenable, like some fragile thing that might snap at any moment. “Come on, dude,” he says, lighter, “you’re not getting rid of me _that_ easily.”

“Why? Why stay, if you’ve...” He waves a hand. “Resolved all of your unfinished business on this mortal coil?”

It’s a fair question. Why does he stay?

Well, he stayed because Vanya asked him to, for one. Because Klaus asked him to, all those years ago. Because he wants to. Because he cares about his siblings. Because he’s been lucky enough to be given a second chance that so many people aren’t, and he’s not going to just throw that away.

“Because,” Ben says, “I don’t think I am finished. Not yet.”

Outside, a stray snowflake still drifts through the air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can come shout about tua with me on tumblr & twitter @confusedbluesky


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